Word: gangsterisms
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...FIRST talking gangster film, Little Caesar, was made in 1930, depicting the gang wars of the '20s. It made an over-night star of Edward G. Robinson ("Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?") and did smashingly well at the box-office. In 1931, Public Enemy followed suit with James Cagney as Tom Powers, a punk kid who becomes a tough-guy criminal. These movies were stories about gangsters' lives. They professed to deter crime by warning the public about violence in the streets, but managed instead to glamourize the gangster as a rebel hero. It was because...
...early '40s, the spy pre-empted the gangster as Hollywood hero. After WWII the national mood turned cynical and gangster movies were revived as grim portrayals of city life, with dark, oppressive lighting, lonely streets in the cold rain, and tough cookies like Barbara Stanwyck who came into their...
...line suffered a decline as such "slice-of-life" films as Room at the Top and The Misfits grew in popularity. In these movies there was no real development either of story or character, only static episodes describing the nature of characters' lives. In the late '60s, when the gangster film returned, heralded by Bonnie and Clyde, it was afflicted with this same absence of drama (and therefore, lack of audience involvement). Instead of stories of gangsters' lives, the films continued in the vein of the slice-of-life drama. They became superficial chronicles illustrating episodes in a criminal...
...Dillinger (the latest cop-out gangster chronicle), written and directed by John Milius, the viewer learns nothing about John Dillinger himself. Dillinger is not developed either as man or myth (although the movie is loaded with pretentious hints at the greatness of his legend). Instead, we merely see a series of overly bloody shoot-outs and Dillinger's eventual death. But we knew from the start that he would die in the end--what we really wanted to know was what Dillinger was truly like...
...height of his career. We don't know how he got to this pinnacle or why he turned to crime in the first place. In a short discussion with his half-Indian girlfriend Billie Frechette (Michelle Phillips), Dillinger (Warren Oates) mentions that he wanted to be a gangster all his life. But this is not enough. We need more...